The Okayplayer Guide to SXSW 2017: A Day-By-Day Breakdown

With the tech and film portions of programming out of the way, it’s time to set our sights to SXSW’s main attraction: the music, of course.

Every year the brightest and most buzz-worthy musicians descend upon Austin to shoot their shot for all of the outlets at all of the houses hoping to nudge themselves past the current tier. For us, it’s an opportunity to point you towards some brilliant new talents. For you, it’s a means of expanding the radar.

But it hasn’t escaped us that getting by on-foot in the annual midwestern music melee can prove to be an undertaking, picking your scheduling sacrifices and plotting out an itinerary that’s more practical than ambitious. With that in mind, we’ve carved out a little track that should prove useful to those partaking in this week’s festivities; a clear and reasonable route to more music and less heart-crushing decision-making (though there will surely be some tough ones.)

In the following pages, you’ll find a suggested route to your SXSW sojourn, broken down day-by-day, pulling no stops whatsoever (unless it’s the bathroom, food truck or  though the former will be a harder find, no doubt.) Commencing the week’s festivities tonight, there is no better place to be than Empire Garage for The Robert Glasper Experiment, Bilal, Terrace Martin and special guests. It’s gonna get weird in a hurry, folks. Brace yourselves.